About “All Too Well”

“All Too Well” finds Taylor reminiscing on the memories of a past relationship from start to finish. The track was written by Taylor and Liz Rose, who was a frequent TS collaborator on both her self-titled and Fearless albums.

Taylor has expressed that this song was the hardest on the album to write. She had 10 minutes of material, but had trouble filtering the important parts. With Liz’s help, she was able to consolidate her feelings into an album-friendly track. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Liz revealed how she and Taylor wrote the song:

When we did ‘All Too Well,’ I hadn’t heard from her in awhile. She hadn’t really been writing. […] I was in my driveway and my phone rings, and it’s Taylor saying, ‘Man, I’ve got this thing and I really need you to help me with it. Can you write today? What are you doing today?’ […] It was the first song she wrote for that record, I think. She had a story and she wanted to say something specific. She had a lot of information. I just let her go. She already had a melody and she started singing some words, and I started writing things down, saying, ‘Ok, let’s use this, let’s use that.’ She mentioned a plaid shirt, and I wrote that down in a corner, and when we got to the end, I said, ‘Let’s put the plaid shirt in there.’ That turned into one of the best lines […] It was the most emotional, in-depth song we’ve ever written.

The song is suspected to be about actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who Taylor was in a relationship with in late 2010. In a 2015 interview with Howard Stern, Jake claimed to not know that Taylor wrote a song about him, which may or may not be true.

The song has received rave reviews from music critics, with many agreeing it was the best song on the album. Slant Magazine particularly lauded the song within its review, saying “"All Too Well” is arguably the finest song in Swift’s entire catalogue.

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What have the artists said about the song?

“It was the first song she wrote for that record, I think. She had a story and she wanted to say something specific. She had a lot of information. I just let her go. She already had a melody and she started singing some words, and I started writing things down, saying, ‘Ok, let’s use this, let’s use that.’ She mentioned a plaid shirt, and I wrote that down in a corner, and when we got to the end, I said, ‘Let’s put the plaid shirt in there.’ That turned into one of the best lines: ‘After plaid shirt days and nights when you made me your own/Now you mail back my things and I walk home alone/But you keep my old scarf from that very first week/'Cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me.’ It was the most emotional, in-depth song we’ve ever written.
She’s such a force. You remember the songs you write with Taylor, because the emotion that goes into them is so palpable. One of my daughters is her age, so I understood that I needed to stand back a bit and make sure we wrote Taylor songs, not Liz songs. I didn’t mess with her. The writers that did try to mess with her lyrics? She didn’t write with them a second time.” – Liz Taylor.

“All Too Well” [was difficult to write emotionally] because it took me a really long time to filter through everything I wanted to put in the song without it being a 10 minute song, which you can’t put on an album. I wanted a story that could work in the form of a song and I called my co-writer Liz Rose and said, ‘Come over, we’ve gotta filter this down,’ and it took me a really long time to get it.” – Taylor Swift.

What has co-writer Liz Rose said about the song?

When we wrote the song,] I hadn’t heard from her in awhile. She hadn’t really been writing. I was in Nashville one day, slowly moving the last bits of junk out of my garage so I could move to Dallas. […] I was in my driveway and my phone rings, and it’s Taylor saying, ‘Man, I’ve got this thing and I really need you to help me with it. Can you write today? What are you doing today?’ [I later] drove over to Taylor’s. It was the first song she wrote for that record, I think. She had a story and she wanted to say something specific. She had a lot of information. I just let her go. She already had a melody and she started singing some words, and I started writing things down, saying, ‘Ok, let’s use this, let’s use that.’ She mentioned a plaid shirt, and I wrote that down in a corner, and when we got to the end, I said, ‘Let’s put the plaid shirt in there.’ That turned into one of the best lines. […] It was the most emotional, in-depth song we’ve ever written. – Liz via Rolling Stone